The winners of the 46th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced last week. Best Graphic Novel/Comics went to Jaime Hernandez for Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection, the latest collection of the long-running series, published by Fantagraphics in 2025. Trung Le Nguyen also won Best Young Adult Literature for the romantic graphic novel Angelica and the Bear Prince, released by Random House.
Hernandez, who created Love and Rockets with his brothers Gilbert and Mario in 1982, was nominated alongside Eagle Valiant Brosi for Black Cohosh, Michael D. Kennedy for Milk White Steed, Lee Lai for Cannon, and Carol Tyler for The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief. His acceptance speech was brief, simply describing his win as “pretty cool,” while thanking Gilbert and more. It marks his second LAT Book Prize, following his win for The Love Bunglers in 2014.
Trung beat out K. Ancrum, Idris Goodwin, Jamie Jo Hoang, and Hannah V. Sawyerr, who were respectively nominated for The Corruption of Hollis Brown, King of the Neuro Verse, My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser, and Truth Is: A Novel in Verse. It marks his first nomination and win at the Book Prizes, and the first bona fide award for the book, which was previously named by the New York Public Library as one of 2025’s Best Books for Kids, and one of the year’s Best Books by the Chicago Public Library.
In an unprepared acceptance speech, Trung acknowledged how unexpected it was for a comic to win the prize, discussing his time in academic spaces being an “apologist” for the medium, and also shouted out his fellow Minneapolitans in the wake of this year’s ICE raids. He followed up with a post on Instagram, where he praised his fellow nominees, calling them “just incredible authors and total joys to encounter, and you should go find and read their books!”
For more from this year’s awards, including all of the winners and nominees, head to the Los Angeles Times. You can watch the entire ceremony, which begins at about 40 mins, in the video below. The Graphic Novel/Comics prize is awarded an hour, 3 mins in, and Young Adult Literature follows at about an hour, 17 mins.
